Many residents of tiny Tisdale, an island-like hamlet of 3,200 on the Saskatchewan prairie, are proud to call their town the rape capital of Canada.
Since 1960, Tisdale’s rare visitors have encountered welcome signs promoting the village as the Land of Rape and Honey – and many locals want to keep it that way, according to town official Sean Wallace.
“From what I understand a lot of people feel there’s a tradition involved in that,” Wallace said. “That’s something I can’t fault.”
All the same, decades of complaints and growing embarrassment recently inspired the town to launch a survey of its citizens to see if they would prefer to “update” the slogan, which uses the traditional name of rapeseed, a mustard-like plant that blankets the treeless fields for hundreds of kilometres in every direction from Tisdale.
“Is it time for a change?” the survey asks, delicately hinting at the problem with the use of capital letters: the Land of RAPE and Honey.
The tradition began when crop scientists in neighbouring Manitoba developed an edible variety of rapeseed (from the Latin rapum for turnip), which had been previously used solely to produce industrial oils. Now grown widely around the world for use as a cooking oil, rapeseed was renamed “canola” (for Canadian oil, low acid) early in its existence for obvious marketing reasons.
But not in Tisdale – at least until July, when the results of the survey will be known.
Residents are “quite passionate” about the issue, according to Wallace, but not because they consider the slogan insensitive.
“There’s some residents who feel I should be educating people about what rapeseed is, and there’s some people who feel I should look at rebranding because it’s no longer called rapeseed any more,” he said. “It’s called canola.”
Among other questions, the survey asks potential Tisdale entrepreneurs whether or not they would like to “promote the current town brand Land of Rape and Honey on your marketing materials”.
At least one local businessperson interviewed about the issue by the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix thinks tradition here might run a little too deep. “I’d like to see it change,” Heather Mievre, owner of Valle Mens Wear, told the paper. “You gotta have some change once in a while.”
